Is this New York Times piece deliberately making the situation it is reporting on worse, or is the writer (Brendan Kuty) just as clueless as his subject?

Baseball’s Spring Training is rapidly approaching, and so are media stories reminding us that it’s on the way. Today The Athletic, the sports publication that the New York Times owns and operates instead of its own sport page, ran a follow-up to the memorable (in a bad way) incident above that I wrote about here right after it occurred, during the World Series Two asshole Yankee fans (but I repeat myself—see? I’m getting ready for the season too!) nearly ripped Dodger outfielder Mookie Betts’ hand off trying to pry a foul pop out of his glove.

Interference was called, the Yankee batter (Gleyber Torres) was called out, and the two idiots were ejected from the game. For some reason it took Major League Baseball months to decide to ban the two from all ballparks for life, but that was ultimately the decision.

But The Athletic decided that it was time to try to make us feel sorry for Austin Capobianco, the jerk on the left in that photo whose name I had mercifully forgotten. We are told that he received a lot of mean phone calls, hate mail and mean messages on social media. Well, that’s what happens when you behave outrageously on national television and nearly hurt someone. An anonymous hater sent a box of poop to his home. Ew! and unethical, but there are a lot of crazy people out there (just look at yesterday’s protest against Elon Musk).

Then we learn that Capobianco wishes the incident never happened (like everyone who takes part in an incident that has appropriate negative consequences). Tough. He says he didn’t go to the game intending to interfere with play. (Rationalization.) He says when it happened, he was just acting instinctively . (Rationalization.) He says Betts cursed at him (Good! And a rationalization too.) Capobianco also says his family has suffered, as if that’s anyone’s fault but his.

He also told the reporter that he “wants to give his version of what happened that night” so that “the constant stream of mostly anonymous vitriol will finally end.” Wow, he really is an idiot! That’s not how it works. If he doesn’t know that, and I guess he doesn’t, then the Athletic reporter was ethically obligated to tell him about the Streisand Effect. More publicity only guarantees that he will get more blowback from the incident, especially since the article shows that he is only sorry about the results of his actions and not the action itself.

I suppose that technically this isn’t precisely the Streisand Effect, which occurs when efforts to suppress negative information about someone only results in wider circulation of what is supposed to be suppressed. Okay, let’s call it the Capobianco Effect, when a wrongdoer tries to make critics see him in a more favorable light, and only succeeds in making more people hate him.

For example, we learn that after the game, Capobianco did an interview with ESPN. Then he appeared on a Barstool Sports podcast. In both interviews, he seemed proud of himself. “[He and Hansen] always joke about the ball in our area,” Capobianco told ESPN. “We’re not going to go out of our way to attack. If it’s in our area, we’re going to ‘D’ up. … Someone defends, someone knocks the ball. We talk about it. We’re willing to do this.” In today’s article, he says, “I’m a good dude who did a dumb thing on camera.” Nothing in the article suggests to me that he’s a “good dude.” He’s a dumb dude who is ethically obtuse. Then he says, in the quote that closes the piece, “I’m a hero in Yankees land. I’m a villain in America. I don’t really care. I just want to be forgotten about. That’s it. I want people to forget about me.”

If he’s a hero to Yankees fans, I don’t regret my comment earlier in this post. And if Capobianco really wants people to forget about him, doing interviews with national publications is not the way to do it.